Why do owners give their new Montreal businesses English names? Apparently they give an air of international cool, according to this Radio-Canada report. But the SSJB is not happy at the tolerance of the trend.
Updates from February, 2018 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Is it spring break or reading week? Transit feels weirdly empty this morning.
Also it’s icy on the sidewalks but that’ll probably melt off in an hour or two.
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Kate
Want to float this out there. TVA has a story Monday about the acquittal of two men in a shooting death five years ago. The text is not explicit in saying their acquittal was a mistake, but the emotional weight of the story is all on that side. It’s a tendency I’ve seen a lot lately, more notably in two recent stories from elsewhere in Canada – the acquittals of Gerald Stanley in the shooting of Colten Boushie and Roger Cormier in the death of Tina Fontaine.
Now those other stories involve indigenous victims and I understand that adds another angle, but the tenor of a lot of the reporting – especially a lot of the tone on social media – is that the courts were wrong, justice was not done, and the defendants should have been found guilty in order to fulfill a social need. The same tone is in the initial article above: the family’s feelings are put above the actual mechanics of law, in that it would have felt to be fairer to see retribution.
But it’s dangerous for us to do justice based on feelings, from victims’ families or from the wider world of social media. There are requirements in the terms of law that lay out what evidence is, what qualifications have to be met, before a person can be declared guilty. Those are important, and they can’t be waived because people feel a certain way about an incident or a death.
This isn’t to say that judges and juries are always right. There’s ingrained social bias all around, but we should all be equally protected by the rules about evidence and proof. Also, I would hold that a judge or jury that’s sat through the sifting of evidence inevitably knows a lot more about any case than a reader who’s skimmed a couple of paragraphs in the media. Joining in a social media dogpile undermines the process of justice, and I don’t think it does society any favours in the long run.
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Kate
QMI says it has found a quiet, unannounced million dollars for parties for the 375th concealed inside other city bookkeeping.
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Kate
On CBC, Benjamin Shingler says the Royalmount mall will transform the city even though it was hatched solely within the Town of Mount Royal.
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Kate
A then-and-now from the Centre d’histoire shows the now empty corner where the Spectrum used to be, vs the Alouette, the cinema that morphed into the venue, and the Beaver Café that used to be upstairs.
Note the QdS logo on the placards dotting that sad empty lot. It’s based on ITC Luna. Ask me how I know.
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Kate
A good op-ed in Le Devoir echoes ant6n’s reservations about the funding and development of the REM.
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Kate
Sad to read that the local news site Pamplemousse is closing.
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Kate
Le Devoir has a Montreal demographics quiz based on information from the maps they published this week.
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Kate
Promised years ago, an observation point at the top of the St Joseph’s Oratory dome is now expected to open to the public in 2020.
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Kate
Here’s a list of impending metro station upgrades expected this year, on the STM site.
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Kate
Bombardier’s bitter tears over not getting selected to build the REM has resulted in Quebec pressuring Montreal to buy more metro cars from them sooner rather than later so’s to keep people employed at their factory in La Pocatière. It’s an attempt to make this city subsidize jobs in another part of Quebec, and at least partly to sustain support for the PLQ there in the upcoming election.
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Kate
Odile Tremblay writes about Claude Dolbec who does sign lettering on the Main. A new documentary, Claude n’est pas mort, tells his story. Unfortunately, the Le Devoir piece doesn’t show any of the man’s work, but there’s some in this 2011 blog piece by Brigitte Schuster (which includes work for Laïka and Fuchsia, both now gone).
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Kate
Every time Formula E is mentioned in the media, the total on the bill gets bigger. Creditors now want $34 million from the Montreal c’est electrique group – which doesn’t have it.
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Kate
The lousy hockey season means lower bar takings as owners try to find other ways to entice people in.
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